The Greatest Reward
by Capitano
Summary: Inspired by Celine Dion's homonymous song, based on Astro Boy 2009. This story wants to be a revision of the movie with a special attention to Tenma/Astro father/son relationship.


**I'm terribly grateful to FantomoDrako for her big and precious help. **

**Chapter 1: Shattered**

_Yesterday I died, tomorrow's bleeding  
Fall into your sunlight  
The future's open wide beyond believing  
To know why hope dies  
Losing what was found, a world so hollow  
Suspended in a compromise  
The silence of this sound is soon to follow  
Somehow sundown_

_And finding answers_  
_Is forgetting all of the questions we call home_  
_Passing the graves of the unknown_

_As reason clouds my eyes, with splendor fading_  
_Illusions of the sunlight_  
_And the reflection of a lie will keep me waiting_  
_Love gone for so long_

_This day's ending is the proof of time killing all the faith I know_  
_Knowing that faith is all I hold_

I couldn't say how many days I've been here. It's been a while since my biological clock doesn't work very well. I didn't care about anything by now. I remove myself from the laboratory just to fulfil those organic functions of every human being. I've reduced the amount of vital necessities that my body needs, like eating and sleeping and going to the toilet, not just because it wastes energies that could be directed towards other aims, but so that my mind never distracts itself, even for a moment. Because if my mind is free to go its own way, it would surely bring me back to that day. And I don't want that. I'm afraid of it. So I have to keep working. It's the only way I have to keep back that army of Furies that hounds me night and day.

My colleagues are always there but they do nothing. Sometimes they stay beside me, almost as if they fear that I'll have a heart attack, other times they stay distant, near the door, almost as if they fear me. They remain motionless and silent - down, with a dark and distressed look. They look like they're attending my funeral service.

I work with precision and with no interruption, animated by a feverish anxiety; a painful impatience of seeing my work completed, of seeing his face again. But from time to time I have to stop. That is the moment when my "crisis" comes: hands start shaking, sight blurs from the tears, eyes watch other images and my mind is kept prisoner by the memories, like in a virtual reality. I know I'm becoming mad; in the few hours where sleep manages to take over me I have nightmares within nightmares, many of them about that day.

Sometimes I have really bad nightmares and those ones are the most terrible, the ones I fear more than any other: I dream of being awakened by Toby's voice. I open my eyes and he's there. I'm still in my laboratory, but there isn't any little robot on the workbench; just my son, beside me. He takes my arm with care; his face is lit by a very sweet smile as he addresses me.

"Hey Dad! You fell asleep, didn't you?" And he bursts into laughter. The laugh of a child is something wonderful, beautiful like a sun ray, and it warms up the heart with a strong but sweet intensity, like a glass of vodka warms up the stomach.

Then Toby turns to smile at me again.

"C'mon. Let's go home."

It looks like so true, so real, that I immediately feel a heavy weight leaving my heart. President Stone, the Peacekeeper, the explosion… it was only just a nightmare. A terrible nightmare. Toby looks like he wants to help me pick myself up, but (unbearable anguish!) when I'm going to stand up I wake up again in my laboratory. Toby has disappeared but in his place there is a little robot that, with all those lines, the scrap and the circuits exposed, almost looks like a skeleton of a dissected child. And so the reality hits me with all its horror, with all its heartbreaking cruelty, with all its merciless violence, like a cannon ball caught full in the chest. The torment is so awful that, for some minutes, I can't even breathe and my mind grows fuzzy and dark, as if I'm going to faint.

I hope these nightmares will end once I finish my project. I don't know what to invent to keep at bay the Hell that's taken root within my heart.

Other times I have dreams about what I'm doing now and about the future. I know my conscience doesn't approve and, on the contrary, it rebels against this idea. But the sadness and the despair have placed a block in my heart that my conscience, with all its efforts, with its entire moral, can't manage to move. But why? How could what I'm doing be wrong if my spirit relieves itself in doing it, if every piece I add to my work removes a piece of that deadweight of suffering I've got inside me?

At times, in the moments where my mind is clouded by the exhaustion, I hear a part of me that cries to stop. But then, a sort of answer-phone activates itself and replies that if I don't do this now, it'll only end up being harder to do in the future; that if I don't satisfy this dream, I'll regret it for all my life.

It's better to do it and risk regretting it than not go through with it and regret it for sure.

Toby will come back to life, in one way or another.

And if this time this should happen to fail… God, I don't even want to think about it!

It must not fail.

It simply must not.

_And I've lost who I am  
And I can't understand  
Why my heart is so broken  
Rejecting your love  
Without love gone wrong  
Life  
Less words  
Carry on_

_But I know_  
_All I know_  
_Is that the ends beginning_

_Who I am from the start_  
_Take me home to my heart_  
_Let me go_  
_And I will run_  
_I will not be silenced_

_All this time spent in vain_  
_Wasted years_  
_Wasted gain_  
_All is lost_  
_Hope remains_  
_And this war's not over_

_There's a light_  
_There's the sun_  
_Taking all the shattered ones_  
_To the place we belong_  
_And his love will conquer_

**TBC…**

**What do you think? Critics and comments are welcome, so… Shoot!**


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